...Those suffering most acutely from Paulophobia are Republicans, self-styled “conservatives” (read: neoconservatives). Now, Republicans have always claimed to believe in smaller, more limited, decentralized government. In short, they pride their party on being the party of liberty, the party that is committed to preserving and protecting the U.S. Constitution.

Yet when they have the opportunity to nominate the only presidential candidate in their primary race who even they recognize is most committed to “limited government” and the Constitution, they call him a “kook” and “extremist.” Some Paulophobes such as talk radio hosts Michael Medved and Mark Levin go further to imply that he is evil. Medved continually insinuates that Paul is a “racist” and a “neo-Nazi.” Levin has explicitly said of Paul that he is “poison.” Both adamantly deny that Paul is authentic.

Republicans, especially since they have been ejected from power, inexhaustibly complain about “out of control” spending. Our country is on the precipice of ruin, they note, because of the profound profligacy of the Democrats. This next election promises to be the most important of our lifetime, for this may be our very last chance to save America.

But when one Republican presidential candidate comes along and proposes one trillion dollars in spending cuts within the first year of his term as President, they either pretend that he doesn’t exist or they spare no occasion to marginalize him. This is like a man lost at sea who, in spite of longing for salvation and knowing that the ship in the distance is his last chance at it, refuses to be rescued. Moreover, he attempts to chop off the arm of the ship’s captain who reaches out to him.

Republicans, like professional Paulophobe Rush Limbaugh, repeatedly claim their party alone embodies the spirit of the Founding Fathers. The Founders, mind you, although a philosophically heterogeneous group, never so much as contemplated a federal government that would demand of all Americans that they refrain from using any product, however potentially self-destructive it may be.

However, when Ron Paul contends that it is unconstitutional and immoral for the federal government to criminalize drug usage, such Paulophobes accuse him of wanting to “legalize” drugs. Ron Paul, they shout hysterically, is in favor of legalizing heroin and cocaine! If these Paulophobes were capable of it, just the slightest bit of rudimentary logic would make plain to them the implication of this line of thought. If Paul can be convicted of wanting to “legalize” drugs because of his opposition to the federal government’s criminalization of them, then inasmuch as the Founders didn’t seek to criminalize drugs, they too can be said to have favored the same. Far from being a radical, much less a radical “leftist” (as Paulophobe Dick Morris recently described him), Paul’s position on drugs is but another example of his desire to restore the vision of our Founders.

Republicans have often (and quite pathetically, actually) taken to accusing their Democratic rivals of being “racist.” It is Democrats, they claim, who seek to keep blacks “dependent” upon the government by way of welfare and a massive assortment of race-based preferential treatment policies. Thus, Democrats are “racist” against blacks.

Because of his belief that we should eliminate foreign aid to Israel, these same Paulophobic Republicans say of Ron Paul that he is “anti-Semitic.” Two observations are here in order.

First of all, Ron Paul does not single out Israel: He wants an end to all foreign aid. More importantly, though, these Paulophobes fail to recognize that if Democrats are “racist” because of their desire to keep blacks dependent upon the U.S. government, then inasmuch as these Republicans want to keep Israel dependent upon the U.S. government, it is they who are “anti-Semitic.”

To put the point another way, if it is the enemies of “racism” who oppose welfare dependency for blacks, then it is the enemies of “anti-Semitism” who should oppose welfare dependency — i.e. “foreign aid” — for Israel. This means that it is the Republican Paulophobe who is the real “anti-Semite,” while it is Paul who is “pro-Semitic.”

In accordance with the 9/11 Commission Report, as well as numerous reports that have been supplied by the Central Intelligence Agency, Ron Paul regularly observes that the attacks of September 11, 2001, specifically, and Islamic hostilities toward the United States, generally, are in large measure the function of an interventionist American foreign policy. That is, the federal government’s actions in the Islamic world are causally related to the terrorism that we are now combating.

For this, Republicans accuse of him of “blaming America.”

But if Paul can be said to be a member of “the blame America First” crowd because of his stance that the federal government has acted objectionably vis-à-vis the Islamic world, then his accusers who have made their careers railing against the federal government’s objectionable treatment of American citizens must be members of the same crowd. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, and all self-avowed champions of “limited government” and “individual liberty,” it turns out, are in reality the most vociferous of American haters, for they are tirelessly criticizing the federal government for something or other...MORE...LINK

Since CNN broadcasters seem so intent on looking back decades into promo letters and newletters put out by one of Ron Paul's organizations,when everyone admits Ron Paul did not write the letters, lets take a look at the background of some of those affiliated with CNN. It's as elitist as you can get, with strong ties to the CIA recruiting ground, Yale University.

CNN is owned by Times Warner who's CEO Jeffery L. Bewkes is a director of the Council on Foreign Relations and also serves on the board of Yale University.

Also affiliated with Yale and CNN are Anderson Cooper and David Gergen.

Anderson Cooper spent time interning, during his summer breaks in his sophomore and junior years at Yale, at the CIA.

Cooper is the son of Gloria Vanderbilt and the great-great-great-grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt. It was J.P. Morgan, Rockefeller and Vanderbilt who developed Jekyll Island, where the Wall Street elite developed the plan to launch the Federal Reserve.

Cooper is also a member of the Manuscript Society (aka The Wrexham Foundation). The Manuscript Society is a secret society at Yale University, like Skull & Bones. The society holds an annual gathering in its tomb on Halloween.

CNN senior political correspondent, David Gergen, is also a member of the Manuscript Society and was a presidential advisor who served during the administrations of Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton.

It is not clear when the Manuscript Society "tapped" blacks for membership, if ever. There are no publicly known black members of the society...MORE...LINK

It is official now. The Ron Paul campaign, despite surging in the Iowa polls, is not worthy of serious consideration, according to a New York Times editorial; “Ron Paul long ago disqualified himself for the presidency by peddling claptrap proposals like abolishing the Federal Reserve, returning to the gold standard, cutting a third of the federal budget and all foreign aid and opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”

That last item, along with the decade-old racist comments in the newsletters Paul published, is certainly worthy of criticism. But not as an alternative to seriously engaging the substance of Paul’s current campaign—his devastating critique of crony capitalism and his equally trenchant challenge to imperial wars and the assault on our civil liberties that they engender.

Paul is being denigrated as a presidential contender even though on the vital issues of the economy, war and peace, and civil liberties, he has made the most sense of the Republican candidates. And by what standard of logic is it “claptrap” for Paul to attempt to hold the Fed accountable for its destructive policies? That’s the giveaway reference to the raw nerve that his favorable prospects in the Iowa caucuses have exposed. Too much anti-Wall Street populism in the heartland can be a truly scary thing to the intellectual parasites residing in the belly of the beast that controls American capitalism.

It is hypocritical that Paul is now depicted as the archenemy of non-white minorities when it was his nemesis, the Federal Reserve, that enabled the banking swindle that wiped out 53 percent of the median wealth of African-Americans and 66 percent for Latinos, according to the Pew Research Center.

The Fed sits at the center of the rot and bears the major responsibility for tolerating the runaway mortgage-backed securities scam that is at the core of our economic crisis. After the meltdown it was the Fed that led ultra-secret machinations to bail out the banks while ignoring the plight of their exploited customers.

To his credit, Paul marshaled bipartisan support to pass a bill requiring the first-ever public audit of the Federal Reserve. That audit is how readers of the Times first learned of the Fed’s trillions of dollars in secret loans and aid given to the banks as a reward for screwing over the public.

As for the Times’ complaint that Paul seeks to unreasonably cut the federal budget by one-third, it should be noted that his is a rare voice in challenging irrationally high military spending. At a time when the president has signed off on a Cold War-level defense budget and his potential opponents in the Republican field want to waste even more on high-tech weapons to fight a sophisticated enemy that doesn’t exist, Paul has emerged as the only serious peace candidate. As The Wall Street Journal reported, Paul last week warned an Iowa audience, “Watch out for the military-industrial complex—they always have an enemy. Nobody is going to invade us. We don’t need any more [weapons systems].”

As another recent example of Paul’s sanity on the national security issues that have led to a flight from reason on the part of politicians since the 9/11 attacks, I offer the Texan’s criticism this week of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The act would allow the president to order indeterminate military imprisonment without trial of those accused of supporting terrorism, a policy that Obama signed into law and Paul opposes, as the congressman did George W. Bush’s Patriot Act...MORE...LINK

Can American civilization collapse? You bet. All others have. We don't need a Mayan calendar to foreshadow the end. Signs are everywhere, we just need a brain to process the onslaught of information.

Of the various cataclysms that 2012 may herald, the first significant one is the Dissolution of the American State.

In America, when we speak of "the state" we mean something like New Jersey. In Europe and elsewhere, it is the central government, including provincial and local governments. It is an entity or apparatus with a life of its own. For most of the history of the world, with very few exceptions, "the state" has been legitimized by gods and kings. As Louis XIV of France declared, "I am the State." Until the American Revolution, there was a wall of separation between government and its people.

Our American State is founded on the principle of "We the People" as the source of all legitimate authority. Its operation is exemplified by Lincoln's famous characterization of it in the Gettysburg Address: a government of, by and for the people. But who today believes our current government embodies these principles?

There is no government "of the people" because "We the People" can't afford to run for office. Candidates need personal fortunes or else most (but not all) will sell out to the special interests.

"For the people"? Only in a convoluted way. Almost 60 percent of all Americans (dependents included) get 100 percent of their income from government (federal, state and local): as workers, Social Security and SSI recipients, other pension beneficiaries and general assistance. The American State, as paymaster to so many people, has created a class of servants. Perhaps this is why the government has no fear to serve itself first. For example, Congress has its own retirement program (not Social Security) its own health benefits and other lifetime perks. The American State also spends billions and billions on programs for corporate and other special interests, thus assuring its survival.

Worse yet, our government is now a "house divided against itself." It is clearly dysfunctional. Elections are an excuse to sow seeds of hatred and discontent.

There is ubiquitous belief that government doesn't serve the public good, and there is an overwhelming lack of confidence in Congress.

Our state can save itself, but not its people. It cannot solve any of the complex problems we face, such as crushing debt, health care, educational reform, immigration policy, failing infrastructure, poverty and underemployment.

When the general population has no faith or stake in the state, it will collapse...MORE...LINK

...Paul’s success – he is currently the frontrunner in Iowa, although the “mainstream” media is doing its best to downplay the numbers – has provoked an outburst of hysteria and pure hate from the War Party. Iowa, they declare, will be rendered “irrelevant” if Paul wins: Joe McQuaid, the bombastic editor of the neocon Union-Leader, rants that “Ron Paul is a dangerous man.” How is that? Well, you see, Paul agrees with the overwhelming majority of Americans who don’t think the Iraq war – which McQuaid and his tabloid supported – was worth the costs in lives and taxpayer dollars. Paul’s anti-interventionist foreign policy views, says the would-be New Hampshire kingmaker, “have been largely overlooked by a news media more interested in the presidential ‘horse race’ than in the candidates’ positions on issues.”

McQuaid is getting on in years, and so probably doesn’t get out much: while he is railing about the media’s inattention to what he considers to be Paul’s mortal sin, virtually every article assessing Paul’s chances since the beginning of the campaign season has harped on precisely this theme. Paul’s appeal is necessarily “limited” due to this: there is a “ceiling” on his support, they aver. As he began to climb in the polls, and this “ceiling” began to lift, the punditocracy declared that Iowa is passé, irrelevant, and an archaic tradition which ought to be ignored from now on by Those In The Know: Gail Collins gave voice to the New York-Washington axis when she sniffed that we ought to “feel free to ignore Iowa,” because “in some rural districts, the entire caucus will consist of one guy named Earl.” That she wouldn’t dare say that if Earl lived in, say, the Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn – where plenty of Earls reside, to be sure – underscores the bigotries our elites allow themselves, these days. In the world of Ms. Collins, some Earls are more equal than others.

The alleged dissonance between Paul’s anti-interventionism and the frothy-mouthed militarism that has been Republican gospel ever since Robert Taft was cheated out of the GOP presidential nomination by the party’s Wall Street wing – (see Phyllis Schlafly’s classic A Choice, Not An Echo, p. 52, for a recap of the Eastern Establishment coup) – has been the constant theme of these pieces, written by youngsters with no understanding or knowledge of history. The one exception, oddly, was John Nichols in The Nation, a liberal-progressive periodical not known for its devotion to libertarianism, who recalled the history of the Old Right in his perceptive piece about the intellectual roots of the Paul campaign. McQuaid, for his part, neither knows nor cares about the history of the conservative movement he presumes to advise: he gets his “conservative” gospel from other sources. He cites Dorothy Rabinowitz’s darkly threatening characterization of Paul as “the best-known of our homegrown propagandists for our chief enemies in the world. One who has made himself a leading spokesman for, and recycler of, the long and familiar litany of charges that point to the United States as a leading agent of evil and injustice, the militarist victimizer of millions who want only to live in peace.”

He left out the part about Paul being a “propagandist for our enemies,” perhaps because it was too much even for him. To the Rabinowitzes of this world – and the Gingriches, the Santorums, the Bachmanns, and the rest of that crazed crew – falls the solemn responsibility of determining the Enemy of the moment. Debate is limited, on this subject, to the question of which Enemy ought to be targeted at this particular point in time. Paul has broken this rule, and allowed that the main enemy – for those who want to limit the power of government, cut $1 trillion dollars from the budget, and emerge out of our economic morass – is in Washington, D.C., not Tehran.

This is literally treason in Rabinowitz’s book, but then again that slim volume only contains several variations on a single theme: anyone who criticizes the regime of war and the constant erosion of our civil liberties is lacking in patriotism, and is quite possibly a “traitor,” a “fifth columnist,” a secret plotter against America and the supporter of its enemies – her enemies. In person – or, at least, on television – her bile is more acidic: here she compares Paul to Hitler and Mussolini while a panel of nattering neocons eggs her on.

One wonders what holds Rabinowitz back from calling for Paul’s arrest as an “enemy combatant” – such restraint goes against the grain of her personal style. It is a style that has long since gone out of style, an echo of the bad old days of the Bush era, when the smoke had hardly cleared from the skies over Manhattan, and the country trembled at the commanding tone of the neocons as they accused war critics – “the decadent left in its enclaves on the coasts,” as neocon tool Andrew Sullivan put it – of wanting to “mount a fifth column.”...MORE...LINK

Given the state of the global economy, it might not surprise you to learn that psychopaths may be controlling the world. Not violent criminals, but corporate psychopaths who nonetheless have a genetically inherited biochemical condition that prevents them from feeling normal human empathy.

Scientific research is revealing that 21st century financial institutions with a high rate of turnover and expanding global power have become highly attractive to psychopathic individuals to enrich themselves at the expense of others, and the companies they work for.

A peer-reviewed theoretical paper titled “The Corporate Psychopaths Theory of the Global Financial Crisis” details how highly placed psychopaths in the banking sector may have nearly brought down the world economy through their own inherent inability to care about the consequences of their actions.

The author of this paper, Clive Boddy, previously of Nottingham Trent University, believes this theory would go a long way to explain how senior managers acted in ways that were disastrous for the institutions they worked for, the investors they represented and the global economy at large.

If true, this also means the astronomically expensive public bailouts will not solve the problem since many of the morally impaired individuals who caused this mess likely remain in positions of power. Worse, they may be the same people advising governments on how to resolve this crisis.

To tackle this problem, we must instead examine this rare and curious condition, and why recent corporate history may have elevated precisely the wrong type of people to positions of great power and public trust.

Unfeeling, but not insane

Psychopathy should not be confused with insanity. It is best described by Robert Hare, global expert and psychologist, as “emotional deafness” — a biochemical inability to experience normal feelings of empathy for others.

This shark-like fixation on self-interest means that psychopaths often feel a clear detachment from other people, viewing them more as sheep to be preyed upon than fellow humans to relate to. For instance, psychopaths in prison often use group therapy sessions not as a healing process, but as an opportunity to learn how to simulate normal human emotions.

Studies on twins have revealed that psychopathy shows a strong genetic signature and there remains no effective treatment. Recent research has linked the condition to physical abnormalities in the amygdala region of the brain.

Only a small subset of psychopaths become the violent criminals so often fictionalized in film. Most simply seek to blend in and conceal their difference in order to more effectively manipulate others. This frightening condition has existed throughout human history, though likely in a marginal and socially parasitic way.

While psychopaths are often portrayed by Hollywood as brilliantly clever, a hypothetical race of Hannibal Lecters would likely perish since they lack the ability to trust each other. Put another way, the human race — a relatively weak, slow, hairless tropical primate — has succeeded so spectacularly in every ecosystem on the planet not because we are so bad, but because we are so good.

Most dangerous 1 per cent

The human ability to build social capital means that people can cooperate and trust each other. We can reliably predict the behaviour of others even if we have never met them. Social capital is the glue that holds together our communities, complex societies, large institutions and the economy. The one and only superpower possessed by psychopaths is their ruthless ability to spend the social capital created by others.

Scientists believe about 1 per cent of the general population is psychopathic, meaning there are more than three million moral monsters among normal United States citizens. There is emerging evidence that this frequency increases within the upper management of modern corporations. This is not surprising since personal ruthlessness and fixation on personal power have become seen as strong assets to large publicly traded corporations (which some authors believe have also become psychopathic).

However, appearance and performance are two different things. While psychopaths are often outwardly charming and excellent self-promoters, they are also typically terrible managers, bullying co-workers and creating chaos to conceal their behaviour.

When employed in senior levels, their pathology also means they are biochemically incapable of something they are legally required to do: act in good faith on behalf of other people. The banking and corporate sector is built on the ancient principle of fiduciary duty — a legal obligation to act in the best interest of those whose money or property you are entrusted with. Asking a psychopath to do that is like recruiting a pyromaniac to be a firefighter.

The folly of mixing psychopathy and senior corporate management has been borne out by recent history. At the end of the last decade, numerous banking institutions representing hundreds of years of corporate financial stability ceased to exist within a few short months due to the reckless acts of a few individuals — none of whom has ever been charged with a crime.

And therein lies the rub. As ruthless as psychopaths are, their pathology dictates that they will ultimately act to the detriment of the organizations and investors they are paid so well to represent...MORE...LINK

As a supporter of Israel, I love the period prior to presidential elections. Candidates in both parties aggressively vie for the Jewish vote, for the backing of Jewish donors, and for the sympathy of Evangelicals who see Israel as a priority. For one year out of every four, Israel has a honeymoon from the usual give and take of diplomacy and political wrangling to which it is normally subjected by its most important ally.

Still, as much as I love these periods, I know it is a mistake to be misled by them. They provide a respite rather than a fundamental change in American policy. Yes, American presidents have different approaches to Israel but, in truth, not very different. American interests remain essentially the same, whether a Democrat or a Republican sits in the White House. (How many times have we heard promises about moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem? How many times have those promises been fulfilled?)

A danger for Israel is that her leaders will misread American election rhetoric. It is easy to be caught up in the euphoria of the moment and forget that the day after the vote, things will return to normal: America will again struggle to balance commitment to Israel with tough geopolitical realities. Support will be provided to Israel, but pressure will also be applied. Israel’s champions will assert themselves, but so will economic factors, oil lobbyists, and “realists” in the State Department.

Indeed, one of the more distressing aspects of the Republican primary season is the durability and resilience of the Ron Paul campaign, with its isolationist and borderline anti-Israel message. Paul will not be president, but his relative popularity is a grim reminder of the degree to which economic hardship has pushed issues of foreign affairs and foreign aid to the margins.

In short, the support-Israel-at-any-price talk in America is just that, talk. And therefore Israel’s leaders should not overreach. The wise course is to avoid self-delusion and to put forward a modest, cautious foreign policy that will position Israel to establish strong ties with the next American President, whoever that may be. Some things to be avoided: proclamations by Israel’s foreign minister that Britain, France, and Germany must behave or they will become “irrelevant”; declarations by aides to the prime minister that he will not write for the New York Times, the most important newspaper in America, because of its critical views on Israel; and, above all, provocative announcements on settlement activity that infuriate all of Israel’s friends and allies, including American officials who, for the moment, are obligated to remain silent...MORE...LINK

When Newt Gingrich said he would not vote for rival candidate Ron Paul if Paul wins the Republican presidential nomination, Gingrich may have forfeited whatever support he might receive from a sizable number of conservative and libertarian voters if the former Speaker of the House is himself the nominee.

Gingrich answered with and unqualified "No," when asked if he would vote for Paul if the 12-term Texas congressman were to emerge as the party's standard-bearer. "I think Ron Paul's views are totally outside the mainstream of virtually every decent American," Gingrich said Tuesday on CNN's The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer. By its very nature the comment appears to impugn not only Paul, but his legions of supporters as well. The people who support Ron Paul share his views on most or all of the issues the candidate has been espousing in this and in previous campaigns. If those views are "outside the mainstream of virtually every decent American," then the unavoidable implication of Gingrich's statement is that "virtually" everyone who holds such views is not a "decent American." Should Gingrich emerge from the primary battles as the nominee, even those Paul supporters who hold the former speaker in "minimum high regard" might be loath to support the nominee who has, in effect, called them indecent.

Gingrich's indictment falls also on voters who are, for various reasons, backing other candidates, but who share many of the views espoused by Paul. Paul's insistence on non-intervention in the internal affairs of other nations, for example, seems to have more appeal to today's war-weary electorate than it did to Republican primary and caucus voters four years ago, when most of the antiwar voters were drawn to the Clinton-Obama battle in the Democratic primaries. But Paul's message appears to be resonating with likely voters in this year's Iowa Republican caucuses, as polls show him in a virtual three-way tie with Gingrich and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney with less than a week to go before the January 3 voting. In Iowa, as in other locales, Paul has evoked the most enthusiastic applause in several debates with his call to bring American troops home not only from Afghanistan and Iraq, but from overseas deployments in 130 countries around the world...MORE...LINK

The Republican presidential primary has become a bit feisty, but it will get downright ugly if Ron Paul wins the Iowa caucuses.

The principled, antiwar, Constitution-obeying, Fed-hating, libertarian Republican congressman from Texas stands firmly outside the bounds of permissible dissent as drawn by either the Republican establishment or the mainstream media. (Disclosure: Paul wrote the foreword to my 2009 book.)

But in a crowded GOP field currently led by a collapsing Newt Gingrich and an uninspiring Mitt Romney, Paul could carry the Iowa caucuses, where supporter enthusiasm has so much value.

If Paul wins, how will the media and the GOP react? Much of the media will ignore him (expect headlines like “Romney Beats out Gingrich for Second Place in Iowa”). Some in the Republican establishment and the conservative media will panic. Others will calmly move to crush him, with the full cooperation of the liberal mainstream media.

For a historical analogy, study the aftermath of Pat Buchanan’s 1996 victory in the New Hampshire primary. “It was awful,” Buchanan told me this week when I asked him about his few days as the nominal GOP front-runner. “They come down on you with both feet.”

The GOP establishment that week rallied to squash Buchanan. Just after New Hampshire, Gingrich’s hand-picked group of GOP leaders, known as the Speaker’s Advisory Group, met with one thing on their minds, according to a contemporaneous Newsweek report: “How to deal with Buchanan.”

While many Republicans dismissed Buchanan’s New Hampshire win as irrelevant, arguing his support was too narrow to ever win the nomination, the neoconservative wing of the GOP darkly warned of a Buchanan menace. “People are panicked,” Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard told Newsweek. “If they’re not, it’s only because they don’t know what’s going on.”

The liberal mainstream media dutifully filled out Kristol’s picture of “what’s going on.” Newsweek put an ominously lit picture of Buchanan on the cover under the words “Preaching Fear.” The article stretched itself into contortions to paint Buchanan as a white racist. (Buchanan was campaigning in South Carolina, which still flew the Confederate flag over its capitol.)

Ted Koppel, on “Nightline” in the days after New Hampshire, relied on unsubstantiated tales (for which he later apologized) about Buchanan’s father as a way of tying the son to “bigoted and isolationist radio orator Father Coughlin.” He also cited a Jewish neighbor of the Buchanans who was beaten up and called “Christ-killer” — without mentioning that Pat was off at college at the time.

Insinuations of racism and anti-Semitism were the weapons of the mainstream media, but Buchanan’s sins in the eyes of the GOP establishment were different. They feared Pat because he rejected a rare inviolable article of faith among the party elites: free trade. Also, in the post-Cold War era, Buchanan’s foreign policy had become far less interventionist than that of the establishment.

It’s similar with Paul. There are many reasons he is unacceptable to the Republican elite. Some of these transgressions reflect badly on Paul. Others reflect badly on the party.

In Paul’s favor, he holds to the professed principles of his party. He makes Republicans look bad by firmly opposing overspending and the unconstitutional expansion of federal power. He correctly predicted the troubles that would be caused by housing subsidies and the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Paul is also disliked for his foreign policy. His non-interventionism has provoked clashes with the party elites, but it resonates with a growing number of Republicans who have grown tired of endless war and nation building that doesn’t seem to serve American interests. But Paul regularly goes too far for even these voters, criticizing the killing of al Qaeda leaders and at times sounding like he agrees with Iran’s grievances against the United States.

But neither his establishment-irritating adherence to principle, nor his hawk-angering foreign policy, will be the focus of the anti-Paul attacks should he carry Iowa. His conservative critics and the mainstream media will imply that he is a racist, a kook, and a conspiracy theorist...LINK

I intended to post sporadically or not at all this week, and that’s still my plan, but there is a new Washington Post article which contains three short passages that I really want to highlight because they so vividly capture the essence of so much. The article, by Greg Miller, is being promoted by the Post this way: “In 3 years, the Obama administration has built a vast drone/killing operation”; it describes the complete secrecy behind which this is all being carried out and notes: “no president has ever relied so extensively on the secret killing of individuals to advance the nation’s security goals.” Here is the first beautifully revealing passage:

Senior Democrats barely blink at the idea that a president from their party has assembled such a highly efficient machine for the targeted killing of suspected terrorists. It is a measure of the extent to which the drone campaign has become an awkward open secret in Washington that even those inclined to express misgivings can only allude to a program that, officially, they are not allowed to discuss.

In sum: the President can kill whomever he wants anywhere in the world (including U.S. citizens) without a shred of check or oversight, and has massively escalated these killings since taking office (at the time of Obama’s inauguration, the U.S. used drone attacks in only one country (Pakistan); under Obama, these attacks have occurred in at least six Muslim countries). Because it’s a Democrat (rather than big, bad George W. Bush) doing this, virtually no members of that Party utter a peep of objection (a few are willing to express only the most tepid, abstract “concerns” about the possibility of future abuse). And even though these systematic, covert killings are widely known and discussed in newspapers all over the world — particularly in the places where they continue to extinguish the lives of innocent people by the dozens, including children — Obama designates even the existence of the program a secret, which means our democratic representatives and all of official Washington are barred by the force of law from commenting on it or even acknowledging that a CIA drone program exists (a prohibition enforced by an administration that has prosecuted leaks it dislikes more harshly than any other prior administration). Then we have this:

Another reason for the lack of extensive debate is secrecy. The White House has refused to divulge details about the structure of the drone program or, with rare exceptions, who has been killed. White House and CIA officials declined to speak for attribution for this article.

Inside the White House, according to officials who would discuss the drone program only on the condition of anonymity, the drone is seen as a critical tool whose evolution was accelerating even before Obama was elected.

The Most Transparent Administration Ever™ not only prevents public debate by shrouding the entire program in secrecy — including who they’re killing and why, and even including their claimed legal basis for these killings (what Democratic lawyers decried during the Bush years as the tyranny of “secret law”) — but they then dispatch their own officials to defend what they’re doing solely under the cover of anonymity so there is no accountability. And, of course, the Post (in an otherwise good though imperfect article) dutifully allows them to do this. In other words: if you ask us about our systematic killing operation, we’ll refuse to answer or even acknowledge it exists and we will legally bar critics from talking about it in public; nobody in government can comment on any of this except us, which we’ll do only by issuing anonymous decrees declaring it Good and Right...MORE...LINK-----------------------

In yet another reversal of his professed commitment to the rule of law, President Obama says he will sign the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which formalizes his authority to imprison terrorism suspects indefinitely without charge or trial.

Where is the “progressive” outrage?

George W. Bush and Obama both claimed that the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) empowered them to have the military hold people merely suspected of association with al-Qaeda or related organizations without charge for the duration of the “war on terror.” It didn’t matter if the suspect was a foreigner, a U.S. citizen, or a legal resident. It also didn’t matter if the alleged offense was committed inside or outside the United States. The battlefield encompassed the whole world.

In interpreting the AUMF this way, both administrations went well beyond its language. On its face, the AUMF only authorizes “the President … to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.”

Clearly the power is restricted to people involved in 9/11 and those who protected them. Yet under novel theories of the executive branch’s constitutional authority, this was turned into a virtual blank check.

The AUMF also makes no reference to indefinite detention or to turning citizens and legal residents over to the military, rather than civilian law enforcement, when they are merely suspected of being involved in a vague class of activities such as “supporting” “associated forces” in the commission of belligerent acts.

Regardless of the absence of the relevant language, both the Bush and Obama administrations claimed these broad powers that make a mockery of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights’ Fifth Amendment in particular.

Now these powers have been formally set down on paper. Ironically, the Obama administration hinted at a veto of the bill because it introduced restrictions on its authority. Carrying on the Bush philosophy that under the Constitution the executive branch has virtually unlimited power, Obama objected to any congressional intrusion into its prerogatives, even if only to codify authority already claimed and exercised...MORE...LINK

...Let’s cut the crap. The GOP establishment’s main beef with Ron Paul is his foreign policy. This ideological chasm is the subtext to most attacks on Paul from the right. To their credit, some of Paul’s critics are man (or woman) enough to confront the congressman on this subject directly. Paul welcomes these challenges and wants his fellow Republicans to debate what a true conservative foreign policy should look like. But the members of the Republican establishment do not want any such discussion. In fact, they fear it.

Most of the 2012 Republican presidential contenders subscribe primarily to a neoconservative foreign policy — the reflexively pro-war, world-police dogma that has been the dominant view in the Republican Party for at least a decade. When Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain was asked by David Gregory on “Meet the Press” in October, “Would you describe yourself as a neoconservative then?” Cain replied: “I’m not sure what you mean by neoconservative … I’m not familiar with the neoconservative movement.” Cain was being honest — he simply knew how most Republicans viewed foreign policy and generally agreed with them. What was this “neoconservatism” Gregory spoke of? Said Cain: “I’m a conservative, yes. Neoconservative — labels sometimes put you in a box.”

“Neoconservative” certainly is a label that puts you in a box. The prefix alone invites curiosity (which is why neoconservatives don’t like it) and the term itself suggests that it represents something different from plain old conservatism (which is why neoconservatives really don’t like it). Neoconservative Max Boot outlined the ideology in 2002: “Neoconservatives believe in using American might to promote American ideals abroad … [The] agenda is known as ‘neoconservatism,’ though a more accurate term might be ‘hard Wilsonianism’ …” Of President Bush’s “hard Wilsonianism,” columnist George Will and National Review founder William F. Buckley said the following during an exchange in 2005:

WILL: Today, we have a very different kind of foreign policy. It’s called Wilsonian. And the premise of the Bush doctrine is that America must spread democracy, because our national security depends upon it. And America can spread democracy. It knows how. It can engage in national building. This is conservative or not?

BUCKLEY: It’s not at all conservative. It’s anything but conservative …

National Rifle Association President David Keene made a distinction between what he saw as Ronald Reagan’s more traditionally conservative foreign policy and the neoconservatives’ comparative extremism:

Reagan resorted to military force far less often than many of those who came before him or who have since occupied the Oval Office. … After the [1983] assault on the Marine barracks in Lebanon, it was questioning the wisdom of U.S. involvement that led Reagan to withdraw our troops rather than dig in. He found no good strategic reason to give our regional enemies inviting U.S. targets.

Keene then asked: “Can one imagine one of today’s neoconservative absolutists backing away from any fight anywhere?”...MORE...LINK

Tuesday, December 27, 2011

"Libertarianism is the enemy of all racism, because racism is a collectivist idea that you put people in categories. You say, well blacks belong here, and whites here, and women here and we don't see people in forms..or gays. You don't have rights because your gays, or women or minorities, you have rights because you’re an individual. So we see people strictly as individuals. We get these individuals in a natural way. So it's exactly opposite of all collectivism and it's absolutely anti-racism because we don't see it in those terms. "

-Ron Paul on Bill Moyers Journal, January 4, 2008

Exhibit B: Ferociously Insists that Courts and The Death Penalty are Racist

“That’s a pretty good question. Because people, somebody asked me yesterday, "When was the last time you ever changed your opinion? And I said well, it's been a while since I've had a major change of opinion, but I try to understand and study and figure out how things work you know and become better at economics and all.

But on that issue (the death penalty), I did have a change of opinion. And I stated this in the debates last go around, they asked…they asked a similar question, ‘when did you change your opinion last?’ And uh, and it, that was just not overnight, but I, my position now is, that since I'm a federal official and I would be a U.S. president, is I do not believe in the federal death penalty and in my book “Liberty Defined”, I explain in it more detail , but basically I make the argument for, uh, against the death penalty but I would not come and say the federal government and the federal courts should tell the states they can't have the death penalty anymore. I don’t go that far.

But no, I just don't think the uh ..with the scientific evidence now- I think I read an article yesterday on the death penalty, and 68 percent of the time they make mistakes. And it’s so racist, too. I think more than half the people getting the death penalty are poor blacks. This is the one place, the one remnant of racism in our country is in the court system, enforcing the drug laws and enforcing the death penalty. I don’t even know, but I wonder how many of those, how many have been executed? Over 200, I wonder how many were minorities? You know, if you're rich, you usually don't meet the death penalty.”

Exhibit C: Stubbornly Refuses to Deny That Government Legalized Racism is Cruel and Unjust

“No form of political organization, therefore, is immune to cruel abuses like the Jim Crow laws, whereby government sets out to legislate on how groups of human beings are allowed to interact with one another.

Peaceful civil disobedience to unjust laws, which I support with every fiber of my being, can sometimes be necessary at any level of government. It falls upon the people, in the last resort, to stand against injustice no matter where it occurs.

In the long run, the only way racism can be overcome is through the philosophy of individualism, which I have promoted throughout my life. Our rights come to us not because we belong to some group, but our rights come to us as individuals. And it is as individuals that we should judge one another.

Racism is a particularly odious form of collectivism whereby individuals are treated not on their merits but on the basis of group identity. Nothing in my political philosophy, which is the exact opposite of the racial totalitarianism of the twentieth century, gives aid or comfort to such thinking. To the contrary, my philosophy of individualism is the most radical intellectual challenge to racism ever posed.

Government exacerbates racial thinking and undermines individualism because its very existence encourages people to organize along racial lines in order to lobby for benefits for their group. That lobbying, in turn, creates animosity and suspicion among all groups, each of which believes that it is getting less of its fair share than the others.

Instead, we should quit thinking in terms of race—yes, in 2008 it is still necessary to say that we should Stop thinking in terms of race—and recognize that freedom and prosperity benefit all Americans.”

-Ron Paul, ‘The Revolution: A Manifesto”, 2008

Exhibit D: Refuses to Deny that Courts Discriminate Against Minorities

“But in order to attract Latino votes, I think, you know, too long this country has always put people in groups. They penalize people because they’re in groups, and then they reward people because they’re in groups.

But following up on what Newt was saying, we need a healthy economy, we wouldn’t be talking about this. We need to see everybody as an individual. And to me, seeing everybody as an individual means their liberties are protected as individuals and they’re treated that way and they’re never penalized that way.

So if you have a free and prosperous society, all of a sudden this group mentality melts away. As long as there’s no abuse — one place where there’s still a lot of discrimination in this country is in our court systems. And I think the minorities come up with a short hand in our court system."

-Ron Paul, CNN Western Republican Debate, October 18, 2011

Exhibit E: Refuses to Back the Unfair Punishment of Minorities

"A system designed to protect individual liberty will have no punishments for any group and no privileges.

Today, I think inner-city folks and minorities are punished unfairly in the war on drugs.

For instance, Blacks make up 14% of those who use drugs, yet 36 percent of those arrested are Blacks and it ends up that 63% of those who finally end up in prison are Blacks. This has to change.

We don’t have to have more courts and more prisons. We need to repeal the whole war on drugs. It isn’t working. We have already spent over $400 billion since the early 1970s, and it is wasted money. Prohibition didn’t work. Prohibition on drugs doesn’t work. So we need to come to our senses. And, absolutely, it’s a disease. We don’t treat alcoholics like this. This is a disease, and we should orient ourselves to this. That is one way you could have equal justice under the law."

“…the federal war on drugs has wrought disproportionate harm on minority communities.

Allowing for states’ rights here would surely be an improvement, for the states could certainly do a better and more sensible job than the federal government has been doing if they were free to decide the issue for themselves. And although people studying my record will discover how consistent I have been over the years, they will uncover one major shift: in recent years I have dropped my support for the federal death penalty.

It is a dangerous power for the federal government to have, and it is exercised in a discriminatory way: if you are poor and black, you are much more likely to receive this punishment.

We should not think in terms of whites, blacks, Hispanics, and other such groups. That kind of thinking only divides us. The only us-versus-them thinking in which we might indulge is the people—all the people— versus the government, which loots and lies to us all, threatens our liberties, and shreds our Constitution.

That’s not a white or black issue. That’s an American issue, and it’s one on which Americans of all races can unite in a spirit of goodwill. That may be why polls in 2007 found ours the most popular Republican campaign among black voters.”

-Ron Paul, “The Revolution: A Manifesto”, 2008

Exhibit G: Openly Admits That Skin Color should be Irrelevant in Society. That Racism is a Sin.

“Racism is simply an ugly form of collectivism, the mindset that views humans only as members of groups and never as individuals. Racists believe that all individuals who share superficial physical characteristics are alike; as collectivists, racists think only in terms of groups. By encouraging Americans to adopt a group mentality, the advocates of so-called “diversity” actually perpetuate racism. Their intense focus on race is inherently racist, because it views individuals only as members of racial groups.

Conservatives and libertarians should fight back and challenge the myth that collectivist liberals care more about racism. Modern liberalism, however, well-intentioned, is a byproduct of the same collectivist thinking that characterizes racism. The continued insistence on group thinking only inflames racial tensions.

The true antidote to racism is liberty. Liberty means having a limited, constitutional government devoted to the protection of individual rights rather than group claims.

Liberty means free-market capitalism, which rewards individual achievement and competence, not skin color, gender, or ethnicity. In a free market, businesses that discriminate lose customers, goodwill, and valuable employees- while rational businesses flourish by choosing the most qualified employees and selling to all willing buyers. More importantly, in a free society every citizen gains a sense of himself as an individual, rather than developing a group or victim mentality.

This leads to a sense of individual responsibility and personal pride, making skin color irrelevant. Rather than looking to government to correct what is essentially a sin of the heart, we should understand that reducing racism requires a shift from group thinking to an emphasis on individualism.”

-Ron Paul, “What Really Divides Us”, December 23, 2002

Exhibit G: Despises Political and Media Code Words for Racism.

“Worst of all, the left has gotten away with using “extreme” as a code word for “racist.” The exceedingly thin “evidence” given for the racism allegation is that Ashcroft once voted against the nomination of a federal judge who happened to be black. Never mind that more than 50 other Senators voted with Ashcroft; the left is all to eager to assure us that the only conceivable rationale is that Ashcroft is a racist. This type of smearing, aided and abetted by a complicit media, is at the heart of the left’s efforts to demonize conservatives who dare oppose their unconstitutional agenda.”

“One of the worst aspects of the census is its focus on classifying people by race. When government tells us it wants information to help any given group, it assumes every individual who shares certain physical characteristics has the same interests, or wants the same things from government. This is an inherently racist and offensive assumption. The census, like so many federal policies and programs, inflames racism by encouraging Americans to see themselves as members of racial groups fighting each other for a share of the federal pie.”

-Ron Paul, “None of Your Business”, July 12, 2004

Exhibit I: Hates Racist and Xenophobic Government Profiling

“We can think back no further than July of 1996, when a plane carrying several hundred people suddenly and mysteriously crashed off the coast of Long Island. Within days, Congress had passed emergency legislation calling for costly new security measures, including a controversial “screening” method which calls for airlines to arbitrarily detain passengers just because the person meets certain criteria which border on racist and xenophobic.”

“The racist effects of Davis-Bacon are no mere coincidence. In fact, many original supporters of Davis-Bacon, such as Representative Clayton Allgood, bragged about supporting Davis-Bacon as a means of keeping cheap colored labor out of the construction industry.”

-Ron Paul, “Repeal of the Davis-Bacon Law”, October 23, 1997, Before the House of Representatives

“The racist effects of Davis-Bacon are no mere coincidence. In fact, many original supporters of Davis-Bacon, such as Representative Clayton Allgood, bragged about supporting Davis-Bacon as a means of keeping `cheap colored labor’ out of the construction industry.”

-Ron Paul, “Introducing the Davis-Bacon Repeal Act”, February 11, 1999, Before the House of Representatives

Exhibit M: Hates Foreign Aid to African Dictators Who Turn Aid into a “Power to Impoverish” their People

African poverty is rooted in government corruption, corruption that actually is fostered by western aid. We should ask ourselves a simple question: Why is private capital so scarce in Africa? The obvious answer is that many African nations are ruled by terrible men who pursue disastrous economic policies. As a result, American aid simply enriches dictators, distorts economies, and props up bad governments. We could send Africa $1 trillion, and the continent still would remain mired in poverty simply because so many of its nations reject property rights, free markets, and the rule of law. As commentator Joseph Potts explains, western money enables dictators like Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe to gain and hold power without the support of his nation’s people. African rulers learn to manipulate foreign governments and obtain an independent source of income, which makes them far richer and more powerful than any of their political rivals. Once comfortably in power, and much to the horror of the western governments that funded them, African dictators find their subjects quite helpless and dependent. Potts describes this process as giving African politicians the “power to impoverish.”

-Ron Paul, “What Should Americans do for Africa?”, July 11, 2005, Before the House of Representatives

“With the election behind us, our country turns hopeful eyes to the future. I have a few hopes of my own. I congratulate our first African-American president-elect. Martin Luther King, Jr. certainly would be proud to see this day. We are stronger for embracing diversity, and I am hopeful that we can continue working through the tensions and wrongs of the past and become a more just and colorblind society. I hope this new administration will help bring us together, and not further divide us. I have always found that freedom is the best way to break down barriers. A free society emphasizes the importance of individuals, and not because they are part of a certain group. That’s the only way equal justice can be achieved.”

“After 200 years, the constitutional protection of the right of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is virtually gone. Today’s current terminology describing rights reflects this sad change. It is commonplace for politicians and those desiring special privileges to refer to: black rights, Hispanic rights, handicap rights, employee rights, student rights, minority rights, women’s rights, gay rights, children’s rights, student rights, Asian-American rights, Jewish rights, AIDS victims’ rights, poverty rights, homeless rights, etc. Unless all the terms are dropped & we recognize that only an individual has rights, the solution to the mess in which we find ourselves will not be found. The longer we lack of definition of rights, the worse the economic and social problems will be.”

Last Saturday, as normal people were doing their Christmas shopping, I was hidden away in a Sky television studio in debate with a neocon. I was discussing the treatment of Bradley Manning, the American serviceman accused of leaking secrets to WikiLeaks, with John Bolton, one of the leading lights of the American right.

The point I was trying to make was fairly simple. As the self-professed leader of the free world, the United States should abide by the highest practices of international law. These arguments have been rehearsed incessantly over the past decade with reference to Guantanamo, renditions, Abu Ghraib and the Patriot Act. Yet the manner of Manning's incarceration has been truly horrific.

For the first 10 months after his arrest in Iraq in May 2010, Private Manning was held in solitary confinement in the Marine Corps Brig at Quantico, Virginia. There he was cooped up in his tiny cell for 23 hours a day. He was required to respond to the shouts of his guards every five minutes. At night, he was woken regularly. His detention included periods of forced nudity, which the military justified by labelling him a suicide risk.

Although conditions have improved since he was transferred to a different jail, Manning's treatment has been criticised by groups ranging from US lawyers to members of the European parliament.

It has taken place not on the watch of a Republican president, but that of Barack Obama's Democrat administration. Obama's record on a number of civil liberties areas, notably anti-terrorism and whistleblowers, is as draconian as any of his recent predecessors. The intent towards Manning has been clear: to try to "break" him so that he admits a direct link with WikiLeaks and to deter others from contemplating doing anything similar in future.

The administration's approach poses a conundrum for conservatives and liberals alike. Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union are vocal in criticising abuses wherever they find them; but their language towards Obama has been more restrained. The US left (or what approximates to it) fears losing what few crumbs come from the table.

The right is also torn in its reaction to Obama's hawkishness, but for different reasons. Should it praise him for refusing to challenge virtually any of the post-9/11 Bush doctrines, less still amending or repealing any of the legislation? Or should it denounce him for being lily-livered, even where he is not?

Bolton's approach fell into the latter. First, he insisted that I must be a "socialist" to air such concerns. He then betrayed his own confusion by suggesting that I had nothing to worry about as I had a "friend" in the White House by name of "O-ba-ma" – his syllable by syllable pronunciation of the president's name was disturbing.

Manning, he insisted, had committed "heinous" crimes. I suggested that, as the pre-trial hearings had only just begun, perhaps Bolton might want to endorse that basic judicial principle of innocence until proven guilty. He moved swiftly on; he reminded me that army prosecutors had indicated they would not seek the death penalty on the charge of "aiding the enemy". We should, therefore, all be grateful for such mercy.

I insisted throughout this exchange that I was not addressing the substantive charges against Manning. I was talking merely about standards in criminal justice, and would be happy to do so again on US networks such as Fox. The calmer I was, the more incensed Bolton became.

Pundits come and pundits go; on one level, this was merely a small piece of Saturday afternoon entertainment for anyone who happened to be watching. But Bolton is more than that. He was, under Bush, the US Ambassador to the United Nations. Now Newt Gingrich, one of the Republican candidates, has dangled him the post of Secretary of State, in the unlikely event of victory...MORE...LINK-----------------------Thousand mile stare of the man Newt Gingrich says will be his Secretary fo State, John Bolton, aka "Bonkers Bolton"

Reports that Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul stormed out of a CNN interview earlier this week seem to be dramatically over-exaggerated.

Raw footage of the Thursday interview shows that it lasted nearly ten minutes, which is not unusually brief on the campaign trail.

After discussing foreign policy, the payroll tax, negative advertisements, and super fund PACs, the interview concluded with three whole minutes of discussion on the issue of the incendiary racist and homophobic letters that were published in Mr Paul's name in the Eighties and Nineties.

Initial news reports made it seem that Mr Paul recited his one line response- that he didn't write the letters, that he didn't read them until about a decade after they were published, and that he disavows them- and stormed off, tossing away his microphone and charging out.

The newly-released CNN footage shows something entirely different. After fielding repeated questions about the controversial newsletters, Mr Paul began wrapping up the interview.

The footage was released on YouTube on the RonPaul.com channel and has the CNN logo in the bottom right hand corner.

The CNN reporter, Gloria Borger, didn't even seem particularly upset or surprised that the interview was ending considering the fact that she was beginning to repeat the same questions on the issue presumably in hopes of receiving a new answer...MORE...LINK

...Obama has claimed the power to imprison people without a trial since his earliest months in office.

He spoke in front of the Constitution in the National Archives while gutting our founding document in 2009.

So why not pick the 220th anniversary of the Bill of Rights to further codify its elimination?

President Obama has claimed the power to torture “if needed,” issued an executive order claiming the power of imprisonment without trial, exercised that power on a massive scale at Bagram, and claimed and exercised the power to assassinate U.S. citizens. Obama routinely kills people with unmanned drones.

As Obama’s Justice Department has broken new ground in the construction of state secrecy and immunity, the Bush era advancers of imperial presidential power have gone on book tours bragging about their misdeeds. One can expect the next step to involve serious abuse of those who question and resist the current bipartisan trajectory.

So what does the latest bill do, other than dumping another $660 billion into wars and war preparation? Well, it says this:

“Nothing in this section is intended to limit or expand the authority of the President or the scope of the Authorization for Use of Military Force.”

In other words, Congress is giving its stamp of approval to the unconstitutional outrages already claimed by the president. But then, why create a new law at all? Well, because some outrages are more equal than others, and Congress has chosen to specify some of those and in fact to expand some of them. For example:

“Congress affirms that the authority of the President to use all necessary and appropriate force pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107-40) includes the authority for the Armed Forces of the United States to detain covered persons (as defined in subsection (b)) pending disposition under the law of war.”

And this:

“The disposition of a person under the law of war as described in subsection (a) may include the following: (1) Detention under the law of war without trial until the end of the hostilities authorized by the Authorization for Use of Military Force.”

Jon Stewart explained when those detained without trial under the law might be released: “So when the war on terror ends, and terror surrenders and is no longer available as a human emotion, you are free to go.”

An exception for U.S. citizens was kept out of the bill at President Obama’s request...

President Obama wanted a bill that limited him in no way, and he is likely to issue a law-altering signing-statement that further removes any offensive limits on absolute tyrannical power.

This type of signing statement is another example of something done secretly by Bush, exposed, turned into a temporary scandal, denounced by candidate Obama, then utilized by President Obama, formally established by executive order, and now more or less accepted by everyone as the norm...MORE...LINK

Sunday, December 25, 2011

...Six months ago, hardly anyone in the US or on the European continent had the faintest clue as to who the Prime Minister of Turkey actually was.

Then, suddenly there he is, glaring from the newsstands around the world. Only the Photoshopped horns sticking out from his forehead were missing.

How did he rise so fast in both the popularity and boogeyman stakes?

The answer lies within a single event, the so called Marmara incident in international waters off the coast of the Gaza Strip. Circle the following date in your memory vaults, because it is likely to carry portentous significance in forthcoming events in the Middle East.

May 31st, 2010.

On that day Israeli commandos seized a six-vessel aid flotilla heading for the embattled Gaza enclave, a gulag hunk of Palestine virtually sealed off by the Israelis with the tacit support of Washington. The armada had set off from Turkey.

In the ensuing struggle eight Turkish citizens and one Turkish-American aboard the MV Mavi Marmara were shot and killed by the boarding party.

Turkey’s demands for an apology from Israel received the response to be expected in the circumstances: zero.

Erdoğan, who is unquestionably the dominant power figure of the Ankara regime, then took a step that was received with rapture throughout the Arab-Islamic world.

He effectively severed relations with Israel, ending a long standing — if frequently uneasy — pact between the Jewish state and the largest Islamic power in the region, dating from Turkish membership of NATO in 1952.

So May 31st, 2010 marked the emergence (as I have written before at End the Lie) of the New Ottomans.

From the perspective of Ankara, the Mamara incident was a fortuitous excuse to hasten the New Ottoman campaign of recovering the Middle East. Erdoğan was transformed to a political rock star, playing to packed houses in Islamic communities around the world.

Washington seethed.

At once Turkey passed from a side player on the tight leash of the US to an independent – and moreover, powerfully armed – force with its own set of strategic priorities.

What is not widely understood outside this turbulent region is the fact that American influence over the course of events is rapidly waning, while that of Turkey is rising fast.

The former arrangement, a bipolar control system managed by the US and Israel, has collapsed.

The New Ottomans’ sudden emergence has changed the cozy two-power happy families game to five; Israel, the US, Iran, Saudi Arabia – and Turkey. In a cauldron bubbling fiercely as the Middle East, this can only spell trouble...

Turkey has most of the main components to join the nuclear club, except the cover story of nuclear power for energy production. She is now forging ahead with nuclear plans by recommitting herself to building an initial three nuclear reactors, with ambitious schemes for a national chain of twenty in place by 2030.

The first is now getting started at Akkuyu on the Mediterranean coast. It will be constructed by the Russian nuclear monopoly Atomstroyexport on a build-and-payback contract from power shunted to the national grid.

Here’s the message. Washington’s attempts to wall off Turkey’s nuclear ambitions have failed, utterly. In former times she could control secular governments or destroy them violently (1961, 1980) if they strayed too far from the imperial agenda.

But since 2001 Turkey has been effectively under one party, popular rule by the Islamist Law and Justice (AK) party, in which the leading figures are Erdoğan and his lifetime collaborator, Abdullah Gül, the president.

Now you can understand the message of the prototype Islamist dictator glaring from the front cover of Time.

Turkey has broken free of the Western, US-orientated support system because the elected Islamists have turned the country into a humming economic power house. She is regularly notching 8% growth rates.

For the first time since the death in the 1930’s of the secularist man-god founder of modern Turkey, Kemal Atatürk, she is a member of the globalist financial and economic club. But she is no longer a colony or anyone’s push-around, for all that.

The Islamists have won their power struggle with the alligator generals of the Turkish High Command, who in the past lynched an elected premier.

In 1961 an army coup backed by the Central Intelligence Agency, the NATO secret army unit called Counter-Guerrilla, extremist activists of the Far Right, and for good measure, the Turkish Mafia, toppled the elected administration of premier Adnan Menderes.

After a brief show trial, he and two ministerial colleagues were taken to an army prison in the Sea Of Marmara and summarily lynched.

Times have changed. The military recognizes that the regime’s popularity in the great Anatolian land mass, where much of the economic revival is under way, is not going to be easily undermined by some false ‘color’ revolution propagated by the CIA and other Western intelligence services.

However, the Time article serves clear notice that Washington does indeed intend to terminate the Erdoğan-Gül regime by any means that it may construct for the task. This pair know a reverse compliment when they see one.

Joe Biden’s off the cuff remarks when he was in Turkey were quite illuminating. In the future he said, beaming warmly at Erdoğan, convalescing from his recent operation, “Turkey and the US will draw closer together.”

He might well have added under his breath (and probably did): “But not with you on the scene, buddy.”

All US efforts to date aimed at destabilizing the Islamic government have come to naught. These have not excluded secretly funding Iraqi-based, so-called Kurdish freedom fighters to stage false flag bomb attacks and murders around the country...

By contrast Erdoğan has delivered hitherto unknown and unrealized prosperity. He has also given Turks a sense of ‘face’ in the world, by slapping down Israel and playing fast and loose with NATO and the US. And he and his winsome partner Abdullah Gül are prize winners in the election stakes, with three unprecedented majority governments in a row.

The US policy of hobbling Turkey to eternal poverty and the curse of the IMF, in order to keep her tame and obedient to the imperial will, lies in ruins.

By 2015, the AK Party will have been in power for the best part of fifteen years. That’s a one party government, or even state, if you so choose. But there are no remotely respectable or realistic challengers among the rag bag of sulking secularists and right wing extremists...MORE...LINK

As the world celebrates the birthday of the Prince of Peace, the Lord of War looms large over the land. The shrikes and talking heads are screeching for Iranian blood, and there are ominous signs in the stars. The war god’s acolytes flood the airwaves with “a complex of vaunting and fear,” as an old prophet once put it, and men of peace are disdained as “weak,” “dangerous,” and “extreme.”

Who will save us from the coming slaughter?

There is no Savior, no man on a white horse or divine sacrificial offering who can stop or appease the gathering demons: they will quaff their chalice of blood, have their pound of flesh, these cannibals of the spirit who demand human sacrifice as the price of propitiation. Blood, honor, “national security,” “world leadership,” the “free world” – these are the words they will invoke, the ritual prayers to the great god Mars that will excuse the thousands killed, tens of thousands maimed – and for what?

For Israel – which must be saved at all costs, even at the price of its very soul.

For the authority of the United Nations – a “den of thieves,” as Lenin rightly called it, and Robert Welch agreed.

For the reelection of a failed president – who would gain the opportunity to blame Iran for the economic catastrophe we brought upon ourselves.

In the end, it boils down to pure economics, and the numbers add up to … war. How else to mask the Depression behind the veil of wartime “necessity”? Can you think of a better way to channel the righteous anger of a slowly-awakening people away from the warlords of Washington and toward some foreign Enemy? Before the peasants with pitchforks come marching up the hill, better to put a sign on the road: TRAFFIC DIVERTED – NO ENTRY.

A cowed people will obey it – at least so our rulers hope and pray. That’s the only time they do pray, come to think of it: not even the war-god is honored by their invocations. They worship him in silence, in secret caverns under the earth, accompanied only by the twin devils of hubris and bloodlust...MORE...LINK

Of all the lies that the neocons came up with to get the U.S. to invade Iraq, the one that most angers me was Bernard Lewis’s lie that Iraq just needed a little nudge in order to unleash the popular surge for democracy and republican government.

Lewis … argues that Arabs have a long history of consensus government, if not democracy, and that a modicum of outside force should be sufficient to democratize the area—a view that runs counter to the huge cultural differences between the Middle East and the West that stem ultimately from very different evolutionary pressures. (see here, p. 50)

I agree that the WMD lie created and promoted mainly by Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and Abraham Shulsky was critical. But Bernard Lewis deserves a special place in academic hell because he used his position as an elite academic to influence policy on behalf of his ethnic brethren in Israel and his close friends in the Likud government.

I assumed that Iraq would implode quite quickly after the U.S. left, but the pace is breathtaking. The LATimes report (“Iraq bombings kill 60, revive old fears“) shows that nothing has changed after 8-1/2 years of occupation, over 4400 U.S. armed forces dead and almost 32000 wounded, and over 100,000 Iraqis dead (see here). The Times article shows that the fundamental social structure hasn’t changed. The country remains divided along ethnic and religious lines.

The scenes of devastation were all too familiar after more than a dozen explosions ripped through the Iraqi capital Thursday, killing at least 60 people and injuring nearly 200, just days after the last U.S. troops left the country.

The attacks, some of the worst in Iraq this year, came in the midst of a political standoff between the country’s main Shiite Muslim and Sunni Arab factions. The dispute threatens to unravel a U.S.-backed power-sharing government, and is spreading anxiety over the prospect of a return to the sectarian bloodletting that devastated the country in recent years.

...In the ideal neocon world, the U. S. would have remained in Iraq indefinitely. Since that didn’t happen, they are doubtless not unhappy to see Iraq’s current turmoil—except that it will be more difficult next time to sell attacks on Israel’s enemies as a crusade for democracy.

I suspect that the neocon strategy will now be to blame the Obama administration for premature evacuation and use this as a trump card in the current campaign for a war against Iran. Already, “Republican leaders have sharply criticized President Obama for not trying harder to keep a U.S. military presence in Iraq. Sen. John McCain of Arizona said on CBS television Thursday that Iraq was ‘unraveling tragically.’ ‘We are paying a very heavy price in Baghdad because of our failure to have a residual force there.’”

It is unclear what price we are paying, since it’s unclear what threat Iraq poses or ever posed to the U.S. But it is certainly the case that this will be an issue in presidential politics in the months ahead. One can imagine the Obama administration being more willing to do the bidding of the Israel Lobby on Iran in order to counter the inevitable charges that he “lost Iraq.”

In a sane society, the neocons would have been executed for high treason for their involvement in the death and maiming of thousands of U.S. citizens under false pretenses, not to mention the trillion dollar price tag. In the U.S., they are preparing for their next war.

And the Israel Lobby has their back. Any intimation of Jewish influence related to Israel policy remains off limits. Thomas Friedman recently had the temerity to write, “I sure hope that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.” But it wasn’t long before he mollified his remarks and said he didn’t subscribe to any “grand conspiracy theories.”

I don’t subscribe to any grand conspiracy theories either. It’s all out in the open. In your face. Just don’t say so in public...MORE...LINK

Saturday, December 24, 2011

There is something incredibly noxious about the post WWII generations of American elites, (and particularly the post Vietnam) most of whom have never served a day in the military, yet are oh-so-eager to prove their "patriotic" and "national security" bona-fides by committing other people's blood (which comes almost entirely from lower downs in the economic pecking order) to back their endless wars against Islamic civilization on behalf of the corrupt status-quo that has so richly rewarded them.

Their haughty mentality seems to be: "We are of a higher caste, a line of chosen. It is our duty to reap the rewards of American society, and the duty of others to sacrifice themselves on our behalf. Our comfortable, grandiose, self-aggrandizing, trifling existence is the highest yearning of society and of the most crucial importance. Never mind that our existence is parasitic upon the masses, and detrimental to the vast majority; that's the natural order, the cosmic-ordained hierarchy. It's only natural that others should sacrifice and die so that we may live out a coddled, self-serving existence and perpetuate our culture of parasitism."

Other than Ron Paul, this is the well-concealed but visceral mentality not only of the current crop of GOP candidates and hierarchy, but of the limousine liberal caste that runs the Democratic Party as well...a mentality that Philip Giraldi captures all too well in the following critique of the new class of chickenhawks that rules Washington, and seeks to rule the world.-----

Nearly all the Republican presidential candidates are showing their muscles, supporting the war on terror and a robust military while also vowing to do whatever it takes to disarm Iran. They know that it is essential to play the jingoistic “American exceptionalism” card, and they understand that being president also means becoming commander in chief of America’s armed forces with the responsibility for committing U.S. soldiers to die for their country. But how are they qualified to do that? Of the sorry lot on display, only Ron Paul and Rick Perry have ever served in the military in any capacity, Paul as a U.S. Air Force medical officer and Perry as an Air Force pilot. The dramatically bellicose Newt Gingrich, who wants to coordinate a joint military operation with Israel to attack Iran, did not serve during the Vietnam War. He received deferments because he was a student and because he was, at the time, married to his first of three wives. Other candidates, including Rick Santorum and Jon Huntsman, are too young to have been subject to the draft, but neither volunteered for military service. Santorum entered a law firm, and Huntsman went to Indonesia as a Mormon missionary before stepping into the business run by his father.

But perhaps the most spectacular chickenhawk of all is Mitt Romney, frequently cited as the likely Republican candidate, who alone among GOP aspirants to the highest office in the land has advocated increasing the size of the Defense Department. Romney apparently is not aware of the foreign policy misadventures of the past 10 years and is eager to double down on a formula that has not worked very well. He believes that the correct response to the many threats in the world is to throw more money at the Pentagon. He also apparently has not noted the sinking economy, which might suggest to anyone but the politically ambitious that retrenchment would be preferable to more interventionism. But as an experienced self-described “businessman” he is not afraid of running up a little more debt.

Romney has several times declared that Iran will never acquire a nuclear weapon if he is president, suggesting that the other candidates are pusillanimous on the issue and implying that he alone will attack the mullahs “preventively” if such a development appears to be imminent. The willingness to start a war with a country that can hardly threaten the United States is the cornerstone of his foreign policy, which he describes as dealing with the world from a position of strength. If that sounds a bit like the Bush Doctrine, it should...

...It has often been suggested that if the children of leading politicians and neocon pundits were required to take up arms to carry out the schemes concocted by their parents, the desire to engage in frivolous wars would quickly vanish. Be that as it may, Romney is far from unique in that one does not see the children of Huntsman, Santorum, Bachmann, and Gingrich rushing off to enlist either. To give Sarah Palin her due, her eldest son did join the Alaskan National Guard and did do combat duty in Iraq, so she, at least, put her money where her mouth most assuredly was.

One can easily argue that President Barack Obama is even worse than the Mitt Romneys of this world, because he was elected in large part by antiwar voters but he has brought more war and a frightful expansion of the state security apparatus, including the indefinite military detention and even assassination of American citizens. But that is to avoid the issue of how a country that so desperately needs peace and reconstruction can produce so many clueless but hawkish politicians who are themselves completely ignorant of war and soldiering except insofar as they follow the Gingrich model of reading about it in books. Nevertheless, the poor fools persist in mouthing the slogans of empire. And it has consequences. Constant warfare might well mean the end of our experiment in republican government and could quite possibly bring about the impoverishment and death of many of us...MORE...LINK

Now that the Arab Spring has come and gone, one of the features of the new Arab Winter is watching how a US/UK-backed brutal Egyptian military dictatorship has become increasingly more violent towards its own pro-reform, unarmed citizens.

There are still a few readers left out there who will understandably be a bit confused and ask, “Wait a minute, I thought Egypt’s military dictator President Hosni Mubarak was ousted during the famous Arab Spring? I thought we brought democracy to Egypt?”

The answer, of course, is ‘no’ – as democracy never made it to Egypt during the Arab Spring. Instead, the US and UK were under a very tight time table because of what was going on next door in Libya and could not afford to have a civilian government full of democratic idealists running that country...

It is important to note that the likes of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and David Cameron are supporting this gruesome violence by the Egyptian State, even in the face of prima facia evidence that the military council is beating and killing its own political opponents. Unlike western crusades to capture the assets of Syria and Iran, following the template of Libya, you will hear no serious moral or lofty ‘human rights’ condemnations of Egypt’s supreme military council coming out of Washington or Whitehall.

Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Just look at how both the US and UK deal with their own protesters at home.

After seeing Occupy Wall Street activists being intimidated, beaten and pepper sprayed by New York City law enforcement, Egypt’s military has cited those same heavy-handed US police actions against the OWS demonstrators in order to justify their own violent suppression in Cairo. The message to protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square is not so different than the one delivered to demonstrators in New York’s Zuccotti Park – and that is, “Pack up and go home now, or else you could be seriously hurt – or worse.”

Notice now that the only regimes who are safe from US-UK or NATO routing them are the monarchies and the military dictatorships in the Middle East. This should tell you all you really need to know in order to understand the foreign policy of western countries today...MORE...LINK

As Congressman Ron Paul accumulates support in the polls, the mainstream media launched a smear campaign attacking the politician with bit of ammo they can find.Latest in their arsenal is a decades’ old newsletter than the candidate has long since dismissed.

While rumors of infidelity led to the collapse of pizzaman Herman Cain’s campaign and the adulterous affairs of former-House Speaker Newt Gingrich poses problems for chance at the GOP bid, the mainstream has only now come after Paul with the first piece of fodder it seems fit for news coverage that relies on scandal and sex more than politics and liberty.

To Paul, however, the allegations are laughable. According to the congressman, he has dismissed a 20-year old newsletter with racist remarks under his name for a decade now and will continue to do so. Despite this, the mainstream media is using everything they can find to find Rep. Paul at fault.

The writings in question came from an early-90s newsletter issued by Paul’s campaign, and though his name is on the newsletter, he says he was unaware of the contents that are now causing controversy. As with all stances the congressman takes, he says that this has been the story he’s offered up ever since he became aware of the contents.

An interview with CNN on Wednesday this week ended abruptly after Paul became irritated that the network wanted to tackle the issue of racist remarks for the third day in a row, even after he had answered questions regarding them on the network hours earlier. Pressed by CNN reporter Gloria Borger, Paul responded, “I never read that stuff. I was probably aware of it ten years after it was written. And it’s been going on twenty years that people have pestered me about this, and CNN does it every single time. When are you going to wear yourself out?”

Borger countered Paul’s comment by asking, “Is it a legitimate question to ask?”

“When you get the answer it is legitimate that you take the answers I give. You know what the answer is?” responded Paul. “I didn’t write them, I didn’t read them at the time and I disavow them. That is the answer”

When Borger called Paul out for his allegedly “incendiary” remarks, he told her that they are only being interpreted that way “because of people like you.”

Iowa Governor Terry Branstad has even gone after Paul while the candidate takes the lead in his own state, insisting recently that a first-place win in the Iowa Caucus is meaningless. “People are going to look at who comes in second and who comes in third,” said Branstad, adding, “If Romney comes in a strong second, it definitely helps him going into New Hampshire and the other states.”

Since the beginning of Paul’s campaign, the mainstream media has attacked the candidate as someone on the fringe and without a chance. Now that is success is being proven in the polls, the reality of a President Ron Paul is hitting the establishment hard and the GOP and mainstream media is going after him with everything they have...MORE...LINK